Adhesive backed price labels have been employed for many years in retail establishments for price marking goods. The advent of machine readable indicia such as UPC, EAN, JAN and WPC bar codes represented a significant advancement toward automating check out procedures and inventory control. Unfortunately, the implementation of manufacturer imprinted machine readable bar codes did not eliminate the necessity for merchants to mark products with human readable price indicia. Such requuirement was mandated by consumer interests in establishments which acquired check out systems incorporating bar code readers and was required, of course, in establishments which did not have bar code reading capabilities.
In addition, prior machine readable indicia was generally limited in scope to preprinted information and did not provide for individual establishment generated indicia and/or individualized data, as, for example, a sequential change in bar code indicia for assigning serial numbers in a production line or date coding otherwise identical merchandise. In the retail environment, individualized machine readable codes for inventory control, merchandise dating, individually weighed items, and the like could not be generated on a hand held portable label printer. The capacity to generate machine readable indicia in retail establishments for control of merchandise movement and the like was not available.
In view of the requirement to maintain the human readable pricing indicia on products at retail establishments, if machines readable indicia were custom imprinted upon a label for application to an article, a second separate label having alphanumeric pricing or other information was generally mandated. This, of course, entailed duplication of manual labor efforts as well as additional costs and possibilities for the introduction of errors.